Why do people like NetHack?

"I think this page should be a kind of FAQ, as it's probably the first place strangers will visit upon seeing the Main Page."

NetHack enjoys popularity in niches. Mathematicians, programmers, physicists, engineers, linguists and writers all feel a strong pull, though anyone with an eye for detail, a sense of completeness, a respect for complexity, and a head for numbers will be at home.

On the surface, the game is a hack'n'slash Dungeons and Dragons clone, but its subtle sense of humor and intellectual rigor elevate it from the faintly nerdy to the sharply geeky.

Just as a mathematician seeks elegant expressions over fuzzy generalities, NetHack eschews graphics in favor of perfectly crafted, well-defined ASCII characters. While other games are dated by their interfaces, NetHack is preserved in ascetic purity.

The programmer is drawn to NetHack as an extension of the operating system. Its culture is deeply intertwined with that of the Unix systems, and indeed is a staple fixture on any good Unix system - a known quantity, ageless, familiar, and soothing; whatever hairy command-line tasks are required, nethack(6) is always there.

NetHack is hard: while other games can be completed in an afternoon, you may go years without finishing NetHack.

NetHack is unforgiving: if you die, you stay dead. There is no save-and-reload crutch here. Put simply, NetHack is a harsh mistress, whose respect you must earn. In time, you learn to respect it back.

NetHack is deep: in your first game, you will die quickly, and come back worrying about how to survive. You will learn, eventually, and move onto higher concerns. You will stop worrying about your score, and start considering questions of optimality, efficiency, and elegance. You will consult tables and guides in search of an edge because everyone knows the best way to have fun in a game is to take 20 until you beat an impossible DC, rather than try to actually succeed at something hard yet possible. You may dive into the very source code, looking to explain that one-in-a-thousand shot you just pulled off. You will probably learn some C, and possibly get into heated debates about the merits of pseudorandom number generators, expected returns, inconsistencies between competing mythologies, and the ethics of exploiting bugs.

NetHack is history: Descending from Rogue, NetHack has 33 years of development behind it. It is one of the few computer games widely played by people who are younger than it. From this history arises a kind of authority.

Graphical user interfaces

As well as the standard ASCII interface, many official and unofficial graphical user interfaces are available. The best known are Falcon's Eye and Vulture. Vulture is actually a continuation of the Falcon's Eye project, but some players still prefer Falcon's Eye.

Title

The title is properly spelled "NetHack", with two capital letters. "nethack" is also correct when used to refer to the name of the game binary. "Nethack" is a common misspelling, even having been used by members of the DevTeam in comments in the source code.

Dungeons of Dredmor is a newer, sprite animated dungeon crawler with a more in-your-face sense of humor that nonetheless feels almost like a GUI rewrite of NetHack, and features direct quotes from NetHack like "You hear the sounds of a cash register."

In the game FreedroidRPG, you can play an ultra-simplified version of NetHack as a game-within-a-game (much easier to beat than actual NetHack).

The Screen terminal emulator has idiosyncratic messages from NetHack, such as "Suddenly, the dungeon collapses." when the program crashes.

The game Spelunky, which has some similarities to NetHack and is inspired by classic roguelikes, dungeon crawlers, and adventure games including NetHack, has NetHack references such as Vlad, his tower, and the camera.

History of NetHack

NetHack's first version, 1.3d, was released in July 1987, descending directly from Jay Fenlason and Andries Brouwer's Hack. Subsequent early versions of NetHack, namely 1.4f, 2.2a and 2.3e were released through 1987 and 1988.

In 1989, NetHack's current incarnation's first release, 3.0.0, was posted to Usenet. It featured a massive expansion over the previous versions.

Several forks of NetHack were produced through the lifespan of both 3.1 and 3.2. The current version is 3.6.0, but 3.4.3 continues to be popular considering that it was the only version available for a long time.